Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity
By Nadya Williams.
IVP Academic, 2024.
Paperback, 240 pages, $26.
Reviewed by Sarah Reardon.
On the walls of the birth center sit posters about birth control. In the office where a team of nurses and midwives work to care for and deliver babies naturally, these posters outline which birth control methods are most effective and advertise different types of birth control. As I pass through the waiting room of the birth center on my way to a prenatal appointment, the irony of this—birth control defeats the purpose of a birth center—occurs to me only subconsciously, cursorily, as if I behold it out of the corner of my eye.
But reading Nadya Williams’s Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic has caused me to stop and behold such irony straight on. Williams relates a similar irony in her own prenatal care: she was put off by the ads for both birth control and Botox and the cold demeanor she saw in the traditional OB/GYN practice where she initially received prenatal care. She saw that children, in the worldview underlying such advertisements, were regarded as “problems to prevent.” But when Williams transferred her prenatal care to a midwife practice, she found a different attitude towards women and children. Alas, in my experience, ironic advertisements and attitudes can pervade even midwives’ practices—even during my pregnancy, the midwives queried me about my post-partum birth control plans.
Williams’s anecdote about birth control fits into the larger story of denigration that she narrates at the outset of Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic. Williams first traces our post-Christian culture’s denigration of mothers, children, and human life at large. She then surveys the ancient world for a parallel pre-Christian perspective on mothers and children and compares this perspective with the Christian recognition of the imago Dei and its ramifications. Williams’s consideration of our culture’s denigration of life is a deep and thorough one, as she considers not merely overt manifestations but even subtle messaging, such as the messaging of birth control ads.
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic reveals that though our culture at large is calibrated against the flourishing of the imago Dei, Christianity encourages us toward a radical and loving approach to all human life. Williams’s book poses and answers many interesting questions, but I will focus here only on what I perceive to be its central theme and most significant lessons.
In the first section of her book, “Symptoms of Disease,” Williams explores the sickness of our culture as regards mothers and children, touching on topics such as prenatal care, abortion, surrogacy, and individualism. We have adopted “thoroughly pagan values about the worth of human life,” Williams maintains. A chapter entitled “Your Assembly Line Life,” particularly evidences the above claim: modern society commodifies children, treating them as products on an assembly line. Fertility technologies that allow parents to seemingly engineer the perfect human testify to this commodification. Williams also discusses schooling as a stop on the “assembly line” of creating the perfect human: “As part of embracing the idol of productivity, we use schools, to which we send our children to enhance our own efficiency in the workplace, to engineer our children as the best of Americans.” In our societal obsession with prestigious schools—from preschool to college—and tendency to outsource education to experts, many parents make the same fundamental error as those who use fertility technology to build the perfect baby: they neither trust God nor honor his image. According to Williams, we are, in both circumstances and in many other habits of modern life, trying to manufacture an ideal person—to press and squeeze the imago Dei into the particular mold that we desire. Thus, even if we do not believe it just to abort babies with Down Syndrome or to use IVF to control the characteristics of children, we may unconsciously welcome the assembly line way of life.
The assembly line and its implications extend far beyond even Williams’s wide-reaching consideration. Birth control provides one prime example of the assembly line mentality, as Williams briefly alludes to. But birth control simply represents one of the first technologies to allow humans to subvert and deny the natural function of their bodies—the medical technologies surrounding transgenderism are one even more stark example.
Williams encourages her readers to step off the assembly line by seeking to delight in reality instead of designing our own, delighting in “each image-bearer’s unique ways of reflecting God’s goodness and beauty, all while recognizing the built-in, all-too-human limitations.” According to Williams, stepping off the assembly line also may practically look like consuming more edifying content, praying for our children, and “reorienting ourselves and our children toward eternity.” Implicit in Williams’s suggestions, too, is a recommendation that, contra the transhumanist technologies of our time, we accept the order that God has woven into nature and the bodies and callings he has given to us.
Williams’s book bestows helpful lessons as it continues: after detailing the sickness of our body politic and its assembly line attitude, Williams reveals how the pre-Christian Roman world was replete with similar (and even starker) commodification and devaluation of human life, drawing on the words and actions of figures such as Aeschylus, Aristotle, and Caesar Augustus. In a society that had no concept of the inherent dignity of human life, the ancient church radically loved and honored the imago Dei, as Williams shows with thorough and compelling storytelling. The story of the early church martyrs Perpetua and Felicity, prominent throughout the whole book, is particularly encouraging: through the love of Christ, they loved and honored their children and one another, all the while standing fast in their Christian convictions against a world that despised such faith. Williams also spends about a chapter discussing how Christ’s love of all kinds of people stands in opposition to the ancient devaluation of human life. While Williams could have explored in further depth the early church practices of rescuing exposed infants and caring for widows, she focused more so on the example and exhortations of Christ himself.
Williams shows that today’s widespread devaluing of human life comes from our societal shift away from Christian ethos. “It is because of two millennia of Christian valuing of human life that we believe that murder and other deliberate harm against other people is wrong,” she writes in one place. Williams’s argument implies that a cultural return to Christian ethics is necessary to re-establish a culture-wide understanding of the preciousness of life. Her argument recalls the ideas expressed by Louise Perry, whose well-circulated First Things essay “We Are Repaganizing” argues that our culture, nourished by Christian concepts of human dignity, is now turning again towards paganism in its devaluation of human life. Perry suggests that we see the Christian era as a “clearing in a forest.” She writes:
The forest is paganism: dark, wild, vigorous, and menacing, but also magical in its way. For two thousand years, Christians pushed the forest back, with burning and hacking, but also with pruning and cultivating, creating a garden in the clearing with a view upward to heaven… with no one left to tend the garden, the forest is reclaiming its ground.
Perry considers the same questions that Williams’s book addresses: in a world that no longer holds in honor the lives of the most vulnerable nor the vocation of caring for the most vulnerable, will the mounting pagan ethos overcome the Christian system of morality that has reigned for so long in the West? Or will our society see a revival of Christian care for the “least of these”?
Neither Perry nor Williams aims to provide answers to these broad questions. In the final section of Williams’s book, she looks at three Christian figures and what they can teach us about how to regard fellow image bearers, devoting a chapter each to the stories of and lessons taught by Perpetua, Augustine, and Wendell Berry. Through her consideration of these Christians, Williams explores hope for the way forward on an individual and local level, but not a broader, societal level. As she acknowledges in her book’s conclusion:
These are overwhelming, big-picture questions. They demand answers, but as the life stories of Berry’s residents of Port William confirm, those answers cannot be grand and broad. Rather, we must give local, concrete, rooted answers—an accounting, a reckoning—to ourselves and to others around us every day. If passive acceptance of the culture leads to death in ways documented throughout this book, to promote a culture of life means deliberately finding the counter-cultural joy in family, in children, in friendships, in meaningful work, and in redeeming our time to the glory of God in a decidedly utilitarian world that questions all things that do not lead to profit.
As much as we might like a grand, systemizing answer to the problems of the age, we must, as Williams reminds us, begin in our own lives to properly value the imago Dei. For most of the time that I read Williams’s book, my newborn baby slept on my chest. Williams’s words did not merely teach me about the ancient world’s disregard for human life and its corollaries today. Her words ultimately encouraged me to love the child in my arms, even if I cannot change the broader culture around me.
Sarah Reardon is a wife, mother, and former teacher. Her writing has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere.
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